


Learning Guile

by jalendavi_lady



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon - Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Canon - Manga, Community: fma_fic_contest, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-17
Updated: 2010-06-17
Packaged: 2017-10-13 04:49:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/133125
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jalendavi_lady/pseuds/jalendavi_lady
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He'd been quite honest as a young man. But time changes things like that, and Time had been given more access to change him than it got with most humans - and he'd had more reason than usual to let it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Learning Guile

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for the Crazy Like A Fox (501-1000 words, blind challenge) prompt at [](http://www.livejournal.com/users/fma_fic_contest/profile)[**fma_fic_contest**](http://www.livejournal.com/users/fma_fic_contest/) . It placed third.

Deception and strategy had not come easily to him.

He had learned before his fifteenth summer what happened to fellow slaves who lied and were caught, and learned it well.

By the time his master trusted him to clean unsupervised and alone in his personal workroom without destroying anything, he was accomplished in the common practice of only saying what was asked for and saying it as unclearly as was safe.

(It was his capacity for secrecy that he was fairly sure, once he had the long hours available to contemplate it, was what had led to him being assigned the workroom cleanings at all, as well as his special role in one of his master’s experiments.)

So, when the strange black cloud in the jar began to teach him how to read and do sums, he would no more have told his master voluntarily than he could have walked through the palace gates and sat on the royal throne. And he was perfectly content still living by his number  
\- he had no real need of the name the cloud that called itself Homunculus had given him, after all.

The first strategic thing he did in his entire life, without instruction from another or from the norms of slave culture in Xerxes, was to offer his master his services as a lab apprentice the day he was caught teaching in the streets.

He shook for hours that night, amazed and terrified at even the thought, just the _thought_ , that any slave could have ever dared what he had just done. What he had just succeeded at doing.

It was his experiences being a quick learner and quick thinker to stay out of trouble that made him such a good student. Even then, he had wondered if surviving on the edge for a while gave him an edge on understanding the basic alchemical foundations that other apprentices in the city simply did. not. have.

(And would never get - no one who had grown up a noble’s son in the capital of Xerxes was likely to ever voluntarily go hungry, much less deign to live with the quality of life of a slave for so much as a single day, and it took being a noble’s son to have the money to get the education that would normally be needed to get one noticed by an alchemist.)

He learned more than alchemy, as he increasingly was drawn into the world of alchemists, and nobles, and eventually the royals themselves. Always in the background, of course - he was still nothing more than an alchemist’s apprentice - but he saw the intrigues, and learned how to see one unfolding and keep well out of the way.

He never participated in them. He was proud, sometimes, of the honesty he shared with the numbers and lines he studied.

Transmutation circles were even worse at lying than Xerxes’ slaves.

He missed the guile of Homunculus completely, to his ongoing and eternal shame.

He became good at hiding through deception - he had to.

He would have had to faster if the infant civilization in Xing hadn’t associated gold with perfection. His eyes and hair were enough to explain an old age with ongoing youth to them, and for long enough that he could learn how to be deceitful himself.

It helped that he had good teachers, very good teachers, and a great number of them. One of Homunculus’ many errors he would discover over the long decades was that the split of the souls of Xerxes had been truly even in ways other than numbers.

He had a very old and accomplished king in his head, and that king didn’t mind aiding anything willing to work against the monster that had done this to him. He had the friends who had been so happy with the changes his tutoring had brought into their own lives, all of  
them. And he’d somehow been granted the presence of his old master, whose approval mattered to his always.

He left Xing when he heard tales of a new force rising in the west, and wept when he heard someone comment that he was going home.

What home? He had no home!

It took a century of traveling around the militarily-growing country of Amestris to realize that something alchemically fishy was going on.

It took another two centuries for him to plot out a possible answer, and another fifty years to plot out and plant the seeds of discovery in Amestrian alchemy.

Then world-weary old Theophratus Von Hohenheim finally found a village that felt like home, and a woman who didn’t care when he told her he was a monster. And who the voices in his head approved of.

(Tricia never knew she was one in a very large number of millions, and whenever he'd tried to get her to see that she had laughed off his compliments. She had always and ever considered herself nothing grander than a village alchemist’s housewife - in emotion if not in  
law - and he loved her all the more for that humility.)

And he sometimes sat there, under the stars - never so many as in Xerxes - and thought towards the moment when Homunculus might finally learn that, just like the words slaves twisted at their masters, sometimes even transmutation circles could be made to have more than one meaning.

He knew he'd have to leave - he always had to leave - but for now it was just him, Tricia, the life of a small-town alchemist, and the voices of old friends and now-friends in his head.


End file.
